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I have an application that recently received a patch that added a page I don't want to the end of every print job. Is there a virtual printer that removes the last page, and then prints to the default printer? (Or would this be a question for StackOverflow?)

System: Windows File Format: Propitiatory report generated by
software client
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  • What environment is this? What format is the file sent to the printer? On Unixy systems, eg Linux/MacOS with CUPS you could create a custom print queue with a custom filter that chops off the last page, but that is a kludge. Note that if the offending last page is some form of disclaimer/copyright notice it might even get you in dodo doing this...
    – vonbrand
    Feb 13, 2013 at 2:40
  • Windows, and the file being printed is a report generated (Without a particular file format as far as I can tell) by a software system that my office uses. The company wants to lose the last page because it is costing us hundreds of pages weekly in a 'paperless' office. (No disclaimers or anything, just an unnecessary page....)
    – Usta
    Feb 13, 2013 at 2:49
  • If you use up all your paper, you will be a paperless office! ;-) Is the patch important? I would be either rolling back or contacting the software authors and telling them about the paper wastage. I don't really get why you want to change the printer driver. What if you wanted to print a single page from another application?
    – paddy
    Feb 13, 2013 at 3:05
  • I was hoping to not edit the print driver, but maybe create a second one that redirects to the default printer after removing the last page. (So I would 'print' to my "Trimming Printer" that would remove last page and auto-print to default printer. We contacted the software developers, and the outsourced tech support basically said it may be removed in a future software release far in the future. Rolling back is not really an option 'cause the patch fixed a lot of stuff that needed fixing.
    – Usta
    Feb 13, 2013 at 4:07

2 Answers 2

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I am going to assume you are on Windows...

I haven't tried this myself, but one option might be to use Ghostscript with the Redirection Monitor:
http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/redmon/en/redmon19.htm

Configure it NOT to prompt for file names. Now it should be acting as a Windows Print Queue that produces PDFs files.

So now you have your document in PDF format - the next step is to use a command-line tool that can split then rejoin PDF pages. Again, I haven't tried this, but perhaps you could use the pdftk burst command to split the file, then use the pdftk shuffle to reassemble the pages back into a single doc. You will need some sort of scripting, such as Windows Powershell or Windows Script Host to glue all this together...

http://www.pdflabs.com/docs/pdftk-man-page/#dest-op-burst

http://www.pdflabs.com/docs/pdftk-man-page/#dest-op-shuffle

This is all extremely kludgy, of course!!

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There is no easy way to do this - if there is any way at all. The application is sending the device to the printer. FYI, the "driver" is the printer and the physical printer itself is the print device. Different versions of Windows also handle printing differently, ie PCL, PostScript, GDI, etc...

Your best bet is to change how the application works, not the printing.

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